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Rural Illinois May Offer Clues to Obama's Electability
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| Parent(s) |
Race
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| Contributor | Scott³ |
| Last Edited | Scott³ Jun 15, 2008 03:13am |
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| Category | News |
| Media | Newspaper - Washington Post |
| News Date | Sunday, June 15, 2008 09:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Washington Post.
"The rookie state senator from Chicago had driven 340 miles to explore southern Illinois, but Barb Brown could muster only 20 Democrats in this small town on the Mississippi River to have breakfast with him. She asked her niece & sister-in-law, who were helping in the kitchen, to come out to pad the audience.
"We tried to convince people that they needed to come out & meet with this senator from Chicago, who on top of everything else was African American," Brown, a circuit court clerk, said of the 1997 gathering. "We had people looking at us strangely."
As Sen. Barack Obama emerges as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, worries linger in his party over whether he can improve on his poor showing among many rural and blue-collar voters in the primaries. Clues to that question lie in Illinois outside metro Chicago, a 400-mile swath of corn and soybean fields that, in the coal country of its southern reaches, shares more with Kentucky & Missouri than with Chicago.
Obama's courting of the region began soon after he was elected to the legislature in 1996. Southern Illinoisans interpreted the visits as a sign that he was already thinking about a future run for statewide office, but the trips also served as an education in the middle-American milieu that Obama's Kansan grandparents hailed from but that he knew little of, having grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia and spent his adult years in big cities. Before mostly white audiences, Obama would joke about his name -- rhyming it with "yo mama" -- and test his message about getting past divisions to solve problems.
Obama's advisers have pointed to his success in winning over "downstate" Illinoisans as a sign of his electability, but political analysts question the claim. Obama lost most of downstate Illinois in his Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate in 2004, and his big win in the general election that year came against Alan Keyes, a black conservative with a Maryland address." |
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